The Annotated Anne of Green Gables (review)

L. M. Montgomery. The Annotated Anne of Green Gables. Edited by Wendy E. Barry, Margaret Anne Doody, and Mary E. Doody Jones. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.

An annotated edition holds a slippery position in the field of letters. Not officially a critical study of the novel at hand, it purports rather to offer readers snippets of factual, contextual information that they can use to help produce their own critical readings. Inevitably, though, the hand of the editor shows through, making subtle suggestions as to what interpretive routes might prove most fruitful. This is not to say that such editorial guidance is necessarily inappropriate or undesirable. In The Annotated Anne of Green Gables, the three editors' explicit focus on some half dozen interrelated aspects of L. M. Montgomery's work is one of the new text's strongest and most valuable features.

The Annotated Anne clearly represents a vast amount of time and scholarly effort. The text of the novel itself is a new edition, compiled from the 1908 first American edition, the 1925 first true British edition, the first Canadian edition of 1942, and Montgomery's holograph manuscript. In their "Variants Between Editions" and "Textual Notes" sections, the editors briefly discuss the bases for their decisions, as well as reproducing an exhaustive listing of all variants throughout the novel. Readers looking for large-scale revelations in the form of added material will be disappointed: the vast majority of the emendations consist of small changes in punctuation and capitalization.

In addition to the revised text itself, the new edition packages together a wealth of supporting materials. The novel is supplemented by 458 footnotes, as well as numerous illustrations and photographs. Prefatory material consists of a critical introduction and an exhaustive chronology of L. M. Montgomery's life. In addition to the aforementioned sections on textual variants, nine appendices follow, on topics ranging from the geography of Prince Edward Island to period cookery. Words and music for three songs, and the texts of eleven recitation pieces mentioned in the novel, are included as well. The volume wraps up with excerpts from a number of contemporary reviews of Anne, and a three-page bibliography.

Physically, the volume is attractive. Pages are wider than the norm, so as to accommodate notes placed in sidebars, rather than at the foot of the page; the book's essays are then printed in two columns per page, which I believe to be a wise decision in terms of ease of reading. Some of the notes, irritatingly, begin on a different page than the material they are referring to, but most are easy to find. Illustrations are black and white; the primary ones include drawings from four different editions of Anne, and photographs of Prince Edward Island scenes--some contemporary, some from historical collections. In addition to these full- and half-page pictures, a great many small graphics appear alongside the annotations. These range in type from further photographs of Montgomery and her surroundings, to pictures of lace patterns, jewelry, flowers, and period clothing. My only quibble with the graphic elements of the book is that some of the pictures are rather too small to see. With sidebar illustrations, this is inevitable. But the editors made the admirable decision, in their "Songs" Appendix, to reproduce actual sheet music--yet they did so at a page ratio of 4:1. Both words and music are thus practically illegible. This is, however, a small fault in an otherwise nicely designed volume.

As I began by saying, much of the edition's supplemental material steers readers toward several clearly defined avenues of exploration. The editors declare an intent to "give modern day readers a better understanding of references to material and popular culture" (vii), and to that end offer appendices on homemade artifacts, food preparation and home decoration, schooling, and popular music and elocution. The first two of these essays contribute to another of the editors...